‘Changers,’ by T Cooper and Allison Glock-Cooper

March 14, 2014

Children’s Books

By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS

For most of us, high school posed logistical challenges. How, for example, should we behave in order to be perceived as cool by kids who are successfully masquerading as cool? And could anyone cool somehow be hoodwinked into hanging out with us? But it seems we had it easy.

“Changers. Book 1: Drew,” a young adult fantasy novel by the husband-and-wife team of T Cooper and Allison Glock-­Cooper, tells the story of Ethan, who, having just moved from New York to Tennessee, wakes up the first morning of freshman year to discover he’s been transformed into a blond girl named Drew. Ethan isn’t pleased to learn that he is a member of an ancient, secretive human race called Changers, and that he will live as a different person for each of his four years of high school. He can’t tell any non-Changers about his predicament, and after graduating, he’ll have to choose which identity to keep for the rest of his life. Changers can’t return to being the person they were before they began changing. Ethan will never be Ethan again.

Ethan — now Drew — wants no part of this. Drew’s parents (one of whom is also a Changer) try to help their only child see the upside of this upheaval. Changers, they explain, are a force for good in the world. By inhabiting different personas, Changers learn empathy. Without empathy, humans won’t survive.

“I know it doesn’t feel like it now,” Drew’s mother says, “but this is an incredible gift you’ve been given. You get to take a journey few are able to. Who hasn’t fantasized about being someone else?”

That sensation of being in the wrong body will be familiar to transgender and gender-fluid teenagers. Bisexual young people — and those unsure about their sexuality — should also relate to Drew, since she eventually falls for both a boy and a girl at her school. The boy is a Changer and is therefore off limits according to commandments put forth by the Changers Council, the authority also responsible for tracking Abiders, an underground group hoping to eradicate Changers.

Over the course of freshman year, Drew becomes a cheerleader (a thoughtful and friendly one, thankfully) and learns that being a 14-year-old girl is “exhausting.” She’s hit on by awkward, creepy boys. She feels fat. She’s shocked by how gossipy and mean girls can be. And she suffers the humiliation of getting her first period in front of a crowd at cheerleading practice. The prospect of enduring menstruation every month is boggling. “I can’t believe I survived a day without stabbing someone in the retina,” Drew says. “I take back every single time I’ve said (or even thought) that girls are annoying.”

The authors generally succeed excellently in giving voice to their likable teenage narrator, especially in the book’s stronger second half. The first half is peppered with language that sounds like adults trying too hard to channel teenagers and not getting it quite right. (“I gotta stay the hizell away from that.” “I’m not a total beyotch.”) These moments aside, the book accurately depicts a world — high school — that can feel like the Twilight Zone even without a secret race of body-changing kids hanging out in the cafeteria.

Done differently, the “Changers” setup, so obviously designed as a metaphor for gender identity issues, could have made the book feel like the middle-grade “Animorphs” series reimagined by a liberal arts college’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program. But “Changers” should appeal to a broad demographic. Teenagers, after all, are the world’s leading experts on trying on, and then promptly discarding, new identities.

Fans of “Changers” will be heartened to know Drew has three more years of high school, which means the authors have planned three more books in the series. Having survived life as a cheerleader, Drew will go on to become a nerd, a jock, and an outcast. Stereotypes will undoubtedly be squashed. And some version of Drew will surely be assigned to detention. Because no series concerned with high school, identity and unexpected empathy would be complete without a nod to “The Breakfast Club.”